Robert Anton Wilson
Jan 18, 1932 - Jan 11, 2007
Summary
Robert Anton Wilson was an author, philosopher, teacher, and lecturer. He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College (1952-57) and NYU (1957-58), where he studied electrical engineering before earning his Ph.D. in psychology from Paidea University, California in 1979.
Wilson served as an editor for Playboy magazine, as a co-founder of the Institute for the Study of the Human Future, and as Director of the Prometheus Society. Long revered as an eminent metaprogrammer and Trickster figure, he is perhaps best known for his writings, including the Illuminatus! trilogy (co-authored with Robert Shea) and for his work as a visionary, occultist, libertarian, and Futurist. Until the late 1990s, he frequently lectured on TV, radio and in person in the United States and Canada. Arlen, his beloved wife and co-conspirator, passed away in 1999.
With his mobility increasingly limited by post-polio symptoms, Wilson began corresponding more with students, colleagues and fans via email and blog. He also became an impassioned advocate of medical marijuana. At the end of his life, though quite frail and tiring easily, his wit and insight continued to inspire family and friends near and far.
Rest in Weirdness, Bob.
Quote
His final blog post, written five days before his death, displays his characteristic humor and outlook: "Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." -- Robert Anton Wilson, Jan 6 2007
(The above is from Erowid)
LSD, Dogs and Me
by Robert Anton Wilson
[writen for a Swiss magazine, on the 60th anniversary of Dr Hoffman's discovery of LSD.]
Greetings to Dr. Albert Hoffman on the 60th birthday of his "problem child!" And greetings to the Free World in general from the occupied U.S.A.! Two major factors have rendered me incapable of believing in the dominant mechanistic-materialist model of mind and the universe: [1] dogs, all of my life, and [2] LSD, since 1962.
About dogs I will write elsewhere; here I will say only that no matter how much mechanistic biology I read, no dog who ever lived as a guest in my house ever seemed like a machine to me. They all seemed like four-legged people.
Every LSD voyager has his or her own unique reports to offer; here I offer only my own recollections of my own experiences, expressed in my own favorite metaphors.
After my first LSD voyage, dogs not only seemed even less like machines than before, but so did bugs and trees and birds and the starry sky itself. After my 100th trip, even I seemed less like a machine.
I have not embraced pantheism or even panpsychism as a philosophy; rather, I have given up on philosophies entirely. I live amid wonders, which I file under the law of general semantics which states that no map can ever show "all" the territory. In fact, I think we should ban the word "all" from ordinary speech and restrict it solely to pure mathematics.
Let me explain that a bit. Consider any large city you know well -- Zurich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, whatever. For the sake of illustration, let me write "Dublin" and you may think of any other city you prefer. Do you think any map of Dublin can show the locations and directions of all the mice in that city? Even if you regard this absurdity as theoretically possible, this map still would not include the flowers, fleas, microbes, etc. -- nor would it depict the emotions, joys, sufferings of the people [or the dogs] -- and it would remain relatively accurate for only seconds. [It could not remain totally accurate for even a nanosecond.]
Now consider our other kinds of "maps" -- our beliefs, our arts, our sciences. Does quantum mechanics tell "all" or even most of the reasons George W. Bush wants to kill Saddam Husein? Does Freudian theory, Marxism, postmodernism, bile samples, or oil prices -- alone or combined into a mega-model --tell "all" about that?
Does Van Gogh tell more or less about vegetation than Beethoven's Sixth, Darwin's Origin of Species or the latest papers on botony? Which geometry reveals "all" the truth about the starry sky above Dublin -- Euclid, Gauss, Lobatchevsky, Buckminster Fuller?
To fully grasp what I mean here, try the following simple experiment: try to say "all" about the page [or computer screen] on which you see these words. Assuming you have it in hard copy, try to write down all you know about the chemical composition of the ink and the paper; if you don't know enough, do some research.
Try to learn "all" about how it got from me to you, even if that requires six months of computer science and electronic theory. Who asked me to write this? Find out "all" you can about her or him. Don't neglect the others involved in the production of this page -- their salaries, their worries, their religions if any, their politics, their sex-lives usw.
And don't forget me: why did somebody ask me to write about LSD and why did I agree? Try to investigate "all" about me. [Hint: in doing this exercize, I discovered that among the infinite reasons I became a writer I could not omit the Danes over-fishing the North Sea 15 centuries ago.*]
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*My paternal grandmother had the name O'Lachlann, which means "son of the Dane" in Gaelic. The Danes took to invasion and conquest, of Ireland and elsewhere, after the fish problem arose.....
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If you continue this search for "allness" reasonably long enough [about two years minimum], the page will have yellowed and the ink might have faded, which will require more nvestigation into chemistry and even political history ---e.g. the paper would last longer if made of hemp; why did the publisher use wood pulp instead?
Now imagine these gigabytes of information entering your brain not in two years, but in two nanoseconds, and radiating not just from this page but from the fruit on the table, the wall paint, the pencil, the cars passing in the street..... and the furthest stars.
That's why LSD has altered the world for so many of us in the last 60 years. Like English poet William Blake we have found "infinity in a grain of sand" and the deeper we look, the deeper the abyss grows. And like Nietzsche, we often suspect that as we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us......
LSD seems to suspend the imprinted and conditioned brain circuits that normally control pereption/emotion/thought, allowing a flood -- an ocean -- of new information to break through. The experience will seem either very frightening or exileratingly educational, depending on how rigidly you previously believed your current map contained "all" the universe. Since I learned that no model equals the totallity of experience long before I tried LSD, I never had a bad trip; but I have seen enough anxiety atttacks and downright wig-outs in cases of the naive and dogmatic that I have never favored or advocated LSD's promiscuous use by the general population. As J.R. "Bob'' Dobbs says, "You know how dumb the average ccitizen is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that."
While splashing about and trying not to drown in this ocean of new information, you generally experience a second LSD surprise: an explosion of newfound energy within your own body. Whether you call this kundalini or bio-electricity or orgone or libido or Life Force, it can trigger muscle spasms, unbridled Eros or just "warm and melting" sensations -- or all three in succession, or all three almost simultaneously -- usually followed by something loosely called "near-death experience" or "out of body experience." Again, this can seem either psychotically terrifying or "religiously" ecstatic, and can imprint short-or--long-term tendecies toward paranoia ["everything wants to destroy me"] or metanoia ["everything wants to help me."] In either case, one tends to retain a heightened awareness of those peculiar coincidences that Jung called synchronicities and Christian conspiracy buffs attribute to hostile occult forces.
In my case, after a few years I found myself seemingly forced to choose, not between paranoia and metanoia -- both by then appeared pitiful oversimplifications -- but between mysticism and agnosticism. I solved that problem, for myself anyway, by choosing agnostic mysticism in the tradition of Lao-tse:
Something unknown, unspeakable,
before Earth or sky,
before life or death,
I do not know what to call it
So I call it Dao
What do I think we should do with Dr. Hoffman's "problem child"? Well, no commodity becomes safer when its manufacture, sale and distribution all fall into the hands of professional criminals; and prohibition, of alcohol and all other drugs, inevitably has that effect, followed by police corruption and public cynicism. Maybe governments should leave this arena entirely and let professional scientists, medical and otherwise, write the guidelines?
Copyright: Robert Anton Wilson
Used with kind Permission
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